Blog

Think for a moment what has pushed you off balance recently? The attacks in London and Paris? The lingering effects of the U.S. election? News about the ongoing impact of climate change? Some trouble your child is experiencing? From one perspective, the stories...

Emotional Agility is becoming something more commonly talked about especially as a quality of leaders. It sounds nice and positive but what exactly is it, where does it come from and how does one develop it? Emotional agility is “the capability to recognize...

Last week I wrote that we have emotions about our emotions. This week is a bit similar but in a different direction. We humans are “assessment machines”. It seems we cannot stop interpreting, developing opinions or creating beliefs about ourselves and the world...

We all know that emotions are not always easy to pin down. Somehow they seem a little slippery and, darn them, always changing. It is a big enough challenge sometimes just to name the emotion we are feeling exactly. To make things even more interesting we...

Looking back over the past 60 years of my life I can see that I have had several distinct relationships with my emotions and various strategies for how to co-exist with them. If it sounds like I am referring to them as something separate from “me” that is...

I’ve always thought about awareness as something a bit mystical and difficult to pin down. It seemed like a good idea but I had put it into the “either you have it or you don’t” column. I’d come to think that either people “were or were not” aware. Very black and...

“Thanks so much for your email. I cried when I read it but, this time, the crying was good – felt nourishing.

The emotion of “dignity” feels very right. I was trying to get to “hope” because I thought that that would be the emotion that would serve me. I could not get to “hope.” Dignity, was right there.

So, I have been wearing ‘dignity’ for a few hours today, and have come up with this declaration: “I will not stand idly by as people spew their ill-will and hate. I will stand up for my own legitimacy as a human being and for others. From this moment on, I stand to protect, cherish, and nourish humanity – mine, yours and everyone else’s”.

Since I connected with my dignity I have noticed that I am no longer afraid to declare that I am a Muslim…

So, tomorrow is the election. No matter how things turn out one thing is absolutely certain: About half of the people wandering around your part of the world, that you run into at the supermarket or that you are stuck in traffic with will be disappointed. They may also be angry, disgusted, incredulous, irritated, despondent, livid or resigned but they will be above all disappointed. Or, it might be you I’m talking about.

The other possible emotions are a bit more difficult to predict but disappointment is not. It was completely predictable all along. Ask yourself why that is. What is it about the emotion of disappointment that makes it something we can expect and prepare for?

To be honest I’ve been hesitant until now to write about the election in the U.S. It seems to be a never ending saga full of unexpected twists and turns. There is a mountain being written about it from many perspectives and varying motivations. My motivation...

One of the great things about true conversations is that we end up learning things and exploring places we had no idea existed before. Sometimes they change the way we think and sometimes they reinforce it but somehow we see the world differently. This...

This week I lived through a personal experience that exemplifies to me how the ontological interpretation of emotions is useful in understanding and navigating life. The event that put things in motion was that an organizational client I have been working with...

The idea of philosophy as something useful would be considered laughable by some. It is something we don’t talk about because we believe it is antiquated, irrelevant and boring. In other words useless.

We live in a world where learning has come to mean acquiring information. This is not how learning has been understood in all eras of human history. At times learning has been synonymous with gaining survival skills, in other times……